Chapter III: Part 3

On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all corners the right to the world’s waste spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.

Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical democrat--as, for the matter of that, I am--and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool. No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman; but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and Australia--a diminution so great that, if it continues for the next century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years, all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward.

There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third- and fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked, comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle’s prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.

A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of substance, then high success was really theirs.

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the world’s surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present based on what has happened in the past. While freely admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest necessary connection between any weakening of virile force and this advance in the moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one’s neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong. We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a state; and they were also as strong men as ever founded or saved a state. Surely such examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to produce.

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social revolution which, in destroying individual rights--including property rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head.

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded, that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale hitherto unexampled, to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation.

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races, because they differ from one another far more widely than some of them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each man and each woman that elementary justice which will permit him or her to gain from life the reward which should always accompany thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and hard and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man should receive.

The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other. The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience. For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an individual in dealing with other individuals.

I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.

THE WORLD MOVEMENT

THE WORLD MOVEMENT[3]

I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.

[3] Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this university covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.] But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for, properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.

The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present--and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.

Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a “world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.

With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically these three peoples--although, judged even by the history of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.

The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.

The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.

This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.

With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture--especially cathedral architecture--and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.

During this period there were several very important extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any European influence.

Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction--Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.

At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as varied as it is striking.

In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

There are, of course, many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.

Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres; but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the details of that practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before.

So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.

The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been--sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded, the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern life.

Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in an ironless age--and, later on, in an age without coal--and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the human race.

The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note, and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision, differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as the rifle is differentiated from the bow.

The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.

In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Greco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in applied science--all these mark our civilization as they marked the wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will not assert that in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the military history of the Greco-Roman period as compared with the history of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when the Roman republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.